30 Years of Mac: Things Remembered and Forgotten

Few people remember just how expensive and unproductive the first Macintosh was. But that classic computer and OS set the stage for computing as we know it today.

Thirty years ago today, Steve Jobs unveiled the original Apple Macintosh. Others will cover the anniversary in more detail—PCMag's coverage is here—but I thought I'd offer some more personal reflections on the things that I remember from the introduction.

On the 25th anniversary of the Mac, I wrote how Steve Jobs and the team behind the original Mac showed me some early versions when I was working for Popular Computing. It was clear from just seeing it that the Mac was something special—in a world that was rapidly coalescing behind the IBM PC architecture, Microsoft operating systems, and Intel chips, Apple was, as usual, headed its own way.

The Mac wasn't the first machine with a graphical user interface—the Xerox Alto and later Star workstations were the inspiration, and Apple previously introduced its own Lisa. But they were much more expensive machines—the Lisa cost nearly $10,000 (the equivalent of over $22,000 today). The Mac was far from cheap—the stating price was $2,495 (about $5,000 in today's money)—but it was within the reach of ordinary people. We often tend to forget how expensive those early computers were.

That interface was something special. I remember the team showing me how it worked, and then later spending a fair amount of time really getting used to the mouse-and-menu system that would eventually become the standard for desktop and notebook computing. Up until then, all of the "serious" machines had command-line interfaces—not just DOS, but also the earlier CP/M and Apple II and III systems.

The hardware folks behind the machine were justly proud of being able to run this kind of an interface in a relatively inexpensive machine. It was based on the Motorola 68000, one of the earliest microprocessors to use a 32-bit architecture. Remember, this was an era where almost all PCs ran on 8-bit or 16-bit processors. Today, of course, even mobile processors are moving towards 64-bits, but it was a big step forward at the time. The Mac also introduced the hard-sided 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, with the ability to store up to 400KB of data. Today, that's a trivial amount of storage. You can't even fit a single full-size JPEG photo or a song onto it. It had an integrated 9-inch monochrome CRT with a resolution of 512 by 342. But it was a step beyond where PCs were at that time.

The Apple team knew it had created something special, and Apple had them "sign their names" to the inside of the case used in the first production of Macintoshes.

Of course, then Apple had to get customers to want the Mac. A lot has been written about the original "1984" ad for the Mac which Jobs used at the introduction and was shown during the Super Bowl. I've heard lots of people say it only aired the one time, but that's not quite true—I remember seeing it on local TV in the Bay Area several times in the run-up to the on-sale date. It's certainly true that Apple got far more attention for the ad than it paid for commercial time.

People tend to think of Apple and Microsoft as competitors, and they have faced off often, but Microsoft was one of the biggest early supporters of the Mac. An early print ad featured Bill Gates, Lotus Development's Mitch Kapor, and Software Publishing's Fred Gibbons talking about the Mac and their initial programs for it.

We think of those early Macs as desktop computers, with the Mac Portable and the MacBook all arriving years later. But I clearly remember a lot of people packing their classic Macs, software, and an external floppy drive into a special bag Apple made (about the size of a large backpack) so it could be a portable.

The biggest thing we tend to forget is how poorly the original Mac really worked. The base system—with just one floppy drive—was a nightmare; you ended up switching disks constantly. Almost everyone immediately went out to get a second drive. Even then, it was a hard system to get any real work done on in the first year or so. It was only later, with faster hardware, better displays, internal hard drives, laser printers, and software like Microsoft Word and Excel and Aldus Pagemaker that the Mac would turn into a machine you could call productive.

Yet, many of us loved those early machines anyway, both for what we could do on it then, and the promise of where it was pointing, which became the mainstream way of doing computing that continues to this day. Thus, it's a milestone well worth celebrating.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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